Coming soon: it’s our landmark TENTH YEAR of the Wondermark Calendar. This one’s going to be pretty special, because I have a workshop now, and I like to make things. (Although the design above is not quite final.)

I think a warning is fair: Patreon subscribers will get the very first crack at them, a day or two before everyone else. We have sold out of our limited runs every single year the calendar has been offered.

This year’s calendar won’t be a story, like the last two years — it’ll be more similar to the Gaxian Almanac (2013) or the Roll-a-Sketch Yearbook (2014), a collection of character vignettes.

It was going to be kind of dark, like it has been more years than not, but after the tumult of last week in the news, I scrapped my existing plan and started over.

Instead, it’s going to be silly. You’re going to enjoy having it on your desk for a year. The goal is for it to bring a smile to your face whenever you look at it.

I know it’s short notice BUT: this very Sunday, November 13, at the very swanky and celebrated home of late cartoonist Mell Lazarus, will be a fundraiser art auction hosted by the Los Angeles chapter of the National Cartoonist Society (of which I am a member).

The auction will be hosted by cartoonist Dan Piraro (of “Bizarro”) and there’s going to be a lot of cool animation and cartoon art for sale, from comics and cartoons and animation — including some from Disney productions and The Simpsons.

And if you’re an L.A. local who’s active in comics, animation, or the arts, this event — or our other, monthly NCSLA meetings — are great opportunities to meet local artists and trade tips and all that kind of network-y stuff.
Email me (dave at wondermark dot com) or leave a comment on this post if you want me to forward you info about the next NCSLA meeting! They’re usually in Hollywood, on a weekend evening.

I got to thinking about how dispiriting it must be to be a principled Republican right now, forced to choose between a candidate you can’t comprehend supporting (Clinton) and a candidate who is a total sleazebag maniac.

And I think people who support Clinton might just have easily been the target of Trump (or someone like him) ginning us up and telling us whatever we wanted to hear. We are not so smart that we would never possibly fall for it, and we would happily rationalize away all their flaws.

And I marvel about the place we’re in as a nation where Clinton is so hated that she could even lose to TRUMP, I mean c’mon, and also Trump is such a trashfire that he might even lose to CLINTON, hated as she is.

So I wrote a news report from an alternate universe where Trump decided he wanted to be a Democrat instead, and principled liberals were faced with the choice of either buying into his sales pitch despite his manifest terribleness; or voting against him, which would mean reconciling themselves to the prospect of voting for someone they loathed — his opponent, Dick Cheney.

Now, I think Democrats had something like a promise-the-moon candidate in Sanders, and clearly that didn’t work out. I’d also like to think that Democrats would be less accepting of abhorrent personal behavior than Trump’s ardent supporters seem to be.

The point of this piece isn’t quite “Trump could have fooled Democrats instead, had he chosen to.” The point is to try and give Hillary supporters a visceral way to feel what many conservatives are feeling right now:

“Imagine what it must be like to have to choose between someone your party canonically hates, and Donald Trump.”